Pulled Pork…

Pulled Pork is a miracle of time, heat and good old-fashioned patience. I would consider pulled pork to be the most quintessential food to the southern identity.

Some stereotypes consider the Southerner to be “lazy” or slow. The truth is, they’re mostly right. We Southerners are quick-witted for sure, but just about everything else we do comes at the pace that is the most adequate for the process. Instant gratification is nice, but in the South, you learn that the longer the investment, the greater the reward. There is no real way to industrialize good pulled pork. It comes in the time that it takes, and you just can’t fake the fidelity of a truly slow-smoked meat.

I’ve been living up North for almost a decade now, and I still haven’t had even half-way decent pulled pork at any of the restaurants I’ve been to. If you want it done right in New England, you have to do it yourself.

Today, I’m slow smoking an 8lb pork butt for my fiance and her family and some of our friends. The 10 hour process is giving me plenty of time to sit back and relax and think about all of the ways in which pulled pork is an allegory for the things I feel represent the south. The smoke in the air is like the fog misting over the smokey mountains, the deep and tender flesh is like the red clay of the Carolina earth, and the gratifying taste of a long day’s effort is like the cool nights after a downright hot day.

The very idea of taking a cheap, tough and generally unusable cut of meat and rendering it into soft, juicy succulent fare is nothing short of an honest to god miracle. It’s a reassuring testament to how the most difficult and evil things can, in turn, be simplified and brought back to goodness. You can’t force the meat to cook slow, you have to wait for it to do its thing. Honoring the process is what it’s all about, and that’s something we used to believe in across the nation. It was the quiet understood meaning behind the slogan “Made in the USA”.